


the same dream once again

by acrosticacrumpet



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pathcode Teasers, Gen, Jossed, Supernatural Elements, Suspense, Teasers & Trailers, by that i mean plotless suspense, or it's going to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 11:31:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3648771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acrosticacrumpet/pseuds/acrosticacrumpet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Across the world, the earth holds its breath, and they know, without needing to be told: It is coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the same dream once again

**Author's Note:**

> i honestly cannot actually believe i wrote this like i have 506798560978 wips and THIS IS WHAT I WRITE CONGRATULATIONS SELF
> 
> ficlet in ten sections, undoubtedly going to be jossed but w/e, i intend to have fun with my own bullshit vague interpretation of these teasers while i can. if you can find plot here let me know because i sure as hell can't I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING TO ME
> 
> listened to various things while writing this including the "now you see me" soundtrack. also, for warnings please see the end notes
> 
> i put suho's section last because he's the leader (well actually bc he's my bias but w/e)

_London_.

 

Kai walks. Businessman speed, first, as if on the verge of being slightly late for a meeting. Then faster, a trail of flapping coat and wind passing across the city, with an edge of panic, the purposeful air turned to something desperate and all-consuming.

 

They’re coming for him. He hopes he looks harried rather than terrified. The expensive coat, the refined, well-tailored suit – they were meant to make him stand out, so that if _they_ came for him, any incident would be noticeable, make it too dangerous for them to engage him. Maybe he should have gone for ‘replaceable kid in hoodie’ instead.

 

Walking faster still. Tourists pass him, oblivious. This isn’t working. He needs to get to the higher ground, delay them.

 

This isn’t what he wanted. He’s a kid. He’s a _kid_.

 

He swans his way into an office building, takes a lift halfway up, then – when everyone else is gone – the stairs, double speed. Spots a balcony, concrete. That’ll do. He heads out. From here you can see almost the whole city, the shining dome of St Paul’s, the blinking light of Canary Wharf, brick and concrete forming a shifting landscape, high, rambling paths over the rooftops.

 

The _ding_ of the lift, distantly, startles him, and he lifts his head sharply. No good. They’re still coming, then.

 

He calls it, feels it building under his skin, out of his control now. Doesn’t matter. Wherever he goes is fine, so long as it’s not where _they_ are.  The tingling under his skin grows unbearable.

 

Around him, London falls away like a burst bubble.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Barcelona_. 

 

Tao’s tea is perfect. He sips at it, delicately, enjoying the drum of his fingers on the table, the crispness of the newspaper next to them. He likes the aesthetic of this scene: the pale light filtering through the windows of the café, the gentle music in the background, a teacup on the table, his tasteful jacket, stylish trousers. The city waiting outside.

 

Sometimes he wants somewhere loud and ridiculous, somewhere he can lounge around in an oversized hoodie and sweats and whine, but this is good too. And Barcelona can provide both. This city is a good home for him, bright and beautiful, welcoming his loudness, his love of looking good, of _style_. Of wearing sunglasses, too: plenty of excuses for that.

 

The feeling rises up and through him, sharp and urgent – fast: it’s come out and through him within a second, and then everything is still, and there are no seconds any more.

 

In the silence, Tao rises. The glass of the lightbulb glints in fragments around him.

 

 _Did I…?_ No, this wasn’t him. It was the lightbulb breaking that _triggered_ this, that made him do it again. _Stop time_.

 

It used to terrify him, this power, when he was a child. Any time he got upset, everything went silent. People could not see him or hear him speak. Nothing moved. He was the one and only thing in the world that still had agency.

 

He can feel his breathing begin to speed up, and fights it down. To some extent, his power scares him still. But it’s also useful.

 

A tiny piece of metal, smaller than any normal bullet, gleams amid the glass.

 

Tao feels things begin to speed up. His feet carry him out of the café, increasing in speed, almost unsteady. The cup held in the hand of the man outside begins to fall. Faster. Faster. Noises like static. He can’t hold it this way much longer. The window glass is cracked, beginning to shatter.

 

Barcelona has been a good home to him, while it lasted. Now he’s adrift again.

 

Stripped down to his childhood fears again, eyes wild – time speeding up around him – under the heat of the midday sun, Tao runs.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Arizona_.

 

Chanyeol wakes to wide skies and rough ground under his back.

 

On his finger, the metal of his ring is warm. Blinking, he reaches sightlessly for his pocket watch: it’s broken again. It usually does that, when this happens. Around him is an unfamiliar landscape of scrubby grass and skies open with light. He stumbles to his feet, eyes still half-shut. In his wool coat he is almost too warm. Everything is open around him, slopes rising out of the landscape in great, jagged curves. It’s beautiful, in a bleak way.

 

So it’s happened again.

 

The fever always takes him this way, taking hold of his body while he’s asleep, shifting hot under his skin. He doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here: it’s probably another country, which is… worrying. It used to be just sleepwalking. Now there are times when he’s pretty sure he managed to get through airport security and catch a plane in his sleep, and faster than he can when he’s awake. His sleeping self, his fever self, is smart. And driven.

 

He walks for hours, never getting tired, sustained by the fever-heat in his cells. The sky changes, its colours shifting like the sea. He finds strange ruins, climbs them, looking out over the landscape. It’s different, this time. Other times, he woke up feeling as if he was looking for something. This time he looks out and it feels… strange, but not searching.

 

It feels like he can breathe. It feels like there’s something in him that’s akin to this place.

 

He walks as the sky grows darker, wandering out of the open, into silent, empty woods where a cold wind – soft as fingertips – trails over the undergrowth. All is quiet, and yet the air feels as if it rings with something. With some echo. That white mist – is that mist, brought on by the cold of the evening, or…

 

On his finger, the ring burns. The fever dances and rages in his skin, and the trees begin to crackle. The air grows hot.

 

As the flames flicker and climb, Chanyeol stands still, skin unscathed by the heat.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Berlin_.

 

Xiumin puffs out a breath and watches it shift and curl, fog in the night air. He weaves over to the door: it only takes him a couple of tries with the key before he wanders in, making his way slowly, meanderingly up bare concrete stairs, leaning on the metal railing. He pulls off his ridiculous, furry hat, and knows his hair is a disaster zone. Music pounds in his ears like a heartbeat, synthetic strings sliding this way and that, space-age. Someone in this apartment block has written the alphabet up the stair rail in calligraphy. He’s never asked who, or why. The lights are glaring against the dark from outside.

 

They are not comforting. They only make the dark darker, without providing any reassurance.

 

His apartment is a mess. It’s 5 am. He should be asleep. His face is shiny-sticky with sweat. He dumps his skateboard, wanders through piles of books scattered on the floor, collapses on the sofa. Pulls off the headphones, suddenly too tired for their constant white noise.

 

His tired eyes at first don’t register anything on the TV, which is still on since last he left the apartment. Then something catches at them – a glitch – and he looks up.

 

Static on the screen, broken by intermittent flashes. A few cryptic words. An image or two, almost gone too fast to see. Xiumin’s breath catches in his throat. The sun, a hollow circle of light, jagged, around a dark shape.

 

His apartment suddenly feels very full. This is it. This is the trail he’s been following, up too late with only a work light and piles of books to keep him company, the source of all those maddening hints that make his skin break out in goose bumps, suddenly cold. This is the restless feeling that rises in him like the wind or a caught breath, that sends him out into the night to drink until it’s quieted, only to return to his apartment where reminders of it are everywhere.

 

Then the meaning of those cryptic words hits him, and he’s up and out of the apartment, not even stopping to grab a jacket, stumbling on exhausted feet but still moving faster than he ever has in his life.

 

Behind him, as car headlights pass by the window, the glass he set down gleams with frost.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Edinburgh_.

 

Sehun rounds another corner, records it with a flick of his fingers on his phone, feet bringing him round onto a deserted suburban street. Around him, trees shake. The Wind is high today, its pull more urgent than usual. It sweeps through his hair, ruffles his clothing, and he shivers. He should have worn a coat. At least he’s got a turtleneck on.

 

Around him, the life of the city goes on as usual, buildings occasionally lit by subdued sunlight as the sun passes out of the grasp of the grey for a moment. He can hear the roar of cars in the distance. In the sky, the clock tower looms.

 

The Wind is a great cold rush, pulling him onwards, impatient.

 

It’s always like this. Since Sehun was little, but especially lately, he’s always been wandering off, getting lost. Following the Wind. (Capital W, always, to the point that his teachers in primary school despaired of his ever understanding grammar when applied to _that particular word_.) He’s learned now to mark his route on his phone as he goes. He always got in trouble, but how could he explain it? How could he ever explain what the Wind is? Cold, overwhelming, all-powerful. Trailing over his skin, bringing it to life, until the restlessness in him is too much and he has to follow. If he doesn’t it only grows stronger.

 

This is a nice area. The house the Wind pushes him stumbling towards has a garden with trees in it, and a conservatory. He’s breathing harder, shuddering. His fingers reach for the handle almost of their own accord. They’ve left the conservatory door unlocked – careless.

 

( _Not luck_ , something whispers.)

 

Inside, everything is silent, is pristine. It takes him a moment to realise why that shouldn’t be: the two children sitting in the conservatory, perfectly quiet, staring up at the toys the Wind holds in the air above them. Floating, preserved in stillness. Stillness preserved by motion.

 

Sehun shivers. Sometimes he could swear the Wind only does this to mess him up, to show him how little he can control, how much it holds in its cold grasp. The sky changes, and his eyes flicker sharply up.

 

Outside, the sky darkens as the sun turns to a jagged circle of light.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Almaty_.

 

On the steps of the tower, Chen’s shoes tap, echoing, as he climbs. His jacket flaps around him – the wind follows him even inside. Up here, the bustle of the city falls away, the sounds turning to so much white noise, like the patter of rain. The city grows small, and the empty skies engulf it. Tap, tap, tap up the steps. The higher up he gets, the easier it feels for him to breathe. The book is heavy in his hand.

 

He walks across the stretch of roof where they hang the sheets out to dry, fabric billowing around him. There’s something about that here, the overwhelming height and the mundane sheets, the blend of the prosaic and the transcendent.

 

Or maybe the prosaic _is_ the transcendent. Chen isn’t one for philosophy. Too impatient.

 

His alcove awaits: the antique chairs and tables he snapped up in the market and painstakingly wrestled up here, the piles and piles of books, rustling in the wind, left in disordered heaps. You could almost map the trails his mind’s been following, the turns it’s taken, by which books have been left open halfway through, which abandoned a few chapters in to follow up some new lead.

 

He’s been coming up here since he was a child. It’s funny, it’s a little furniture and some books in a shadowy corner on the roof of a well-nigh abandoned building, and when he started off here it wasn’t even that, but he always finds himself going silent and a little solemn when he arrives at the top. Like it’s a shrine.

 

He doesn’t dwell on that, though: the real reason his child-self picked this place is because it’s the best place to watch storms.

 

(And because it’s _his_. Because it feels safe. _Careful with that_ , the old man at the market said a few months ago, when he picked up that shipment of old books. _Keep it secret, keep it safe_ , and he’d wanted to laugh it off, but he hadn’t felt like laughing at all.)

 

He opens the book he brought today, flips through it. _Overdose_. He’s found excerpts of it, with difficulty, online, but never the whole text before. _Earth’s children, they were born far from her… Twice they are storied, and must be once again… They came first in the dark time, the age of wonders, the wolf-time as it was called… In their second coming they sought the labyrinth, but it turned to webs around them…_

 

The wind picks up, and Chen glances up as the text on the page becomes difficult to read. The sky grows dark. He watches the sun fall into shadow, watches clouds gather over the city below, and his breath catches as the feeling grows stronger, like static electricity, prickling over the hair on his skin.

 

Far away, beneath the clouds, lightning tears the sky apart.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Lyon_.

 

Baekhyun walks the night, music always in his ears, at his side – a constant rhythm, a pattern of echoes. It turns his wandering into a path, the streets into a map. Not that he needs a map: this is his city, he knows it like the back of his hand.

 

This is his city, and this is his time. He likes walking the streets like this. He lets his path carry him up towards the cathedral, watched only by the statues, the inaudible crickets, the streetlights. With the music echoing and repeating in his ears, in his leather jacket under a starless sky, he feels powerful. He feels known. This is his time and place, here in the dark, just him and the city lights.

 

He takes the old steps down into the Old Quarter, where the streets are cobbled and the lights spaced far apart, and the windows high up, leaving him surrounded by centuries-old brick. It’s darker here, but he has the lights and the music. Besides, he knows the Old Quarter. He’s been wandering this city by night for a very long time, falling into a kind of trance.

 

Suddenly his music shuts off. Weird. He checks his phone, wondering if the earphone cable’s come out somehow. It’s still there. Static plays across the screen of his phone, interspersed with flashing images, as if someone’s trying to get something through to him, through a barrier. There’s a ringing noise in his ears. Flashes of speech.

 

In the sudden dark, he realises he only knows the Old Quarter until the lights go off.

 

He starts running as soon as the first streetlight shuts off. Doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what caused it – doesn’t matter that it’s only one light – the next one follows suit as soon as he starts to move. He may not know how it’s being done, but he knows who it is. Nameless but ever-present. His heart pounds like a rabbit’s – he can scarcely breathe – he keeps running, frantic, desperate enough not to care where he goes –

 

He hits walls and bounces off them, keeps running. He doesn’t know where he is any more, it’s dark around him and the city is a stranger – it’s dark, it’s _dark_ – and he knows who this is. He knows this is _them_ –

 

Back to a locked gate, he lets out a shuddering exhale as the last light shuts off. This is the end of his night walks, then, cheating the dark with music and streetlights and the knowledge in his feet. He blinks, slowly, as if that will help.

 

As the air around him turns pitch dark, he breathes light into it like sweat in slow motion.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Yunnan_.

 

Lay walks his bike through the still night, a breath of quiet air moving through the channels of the old streets, carrying quietness around him like a bubble, far from the crowds that fill the trains and the department stores. He could cycle and it’d be quicker, but these streets are narrow, with sharp corners that pedestrians round unexpectedly. Besides, walking is more peaceful, and this is the time he takes just for himself, the still time. His eyes flick down to a wilted flower in the road. Sad to see it like that: its perseverance, growing here, is… something worth admiring.

 

Really, it’s time the tea house was closed, but the owner knows his habits by now, leaves the door on the latch for him. He leaves his bike outside, pads in on silent feet. The owner is asleep waiting for him, again, and Lay can’t help but smile.

 

He’s shown to his usual table. In his ears, the piano meanders its way through a chord progression, lingering here and there, curling around corners before trilling out again. Like a lover on his way home, now stopping, now starting, half drunk on happiness. Well, this is to be a love song, after all. That chord right there – that’s not quite where he wants it, but he can’t force it.

 

A clink as the man sets his tea down on the table. Lay flicks his eyes upwards in thanks. While he waits for harmonic inspiration to hit, those lyrics still need work. His fingers fly across the screen of his phone, throwing out ideas.

 

He’s always been a bit of a night owl. There’s something about the quiet, when most people have gone to bed, that creates this perfect state of calm for him to work in. As if he can feel the patterns of things, the wholeness of them, better this way. It’s why he volunteers for night shifts at the hospital sometimes, feeling more awake then than at any other time. In truth, though, he prefers to be here, sipping tea in an empty teahouse, writing love songs in the dark.

 

The piano cuts out all of a sudden. 

 

Ringing in his ears, intermittent static, and he feels – _knows_ – this isn’t just sound. The pattern is broken, his whole body rings with it. He can feel it, he can _tell_. His breath catches, his whole being fills with irrational terror. _The wholeness is breaking apart. Something in the world is broken_.

 

He stands, abruptly, stares around, leaving the chair behind him to fall to the floor with a thud that never reaches his ears. There is nothing in his ears but static. He feels more than hears his heartbeat racing ahead. Within a few moments, breathing hard, frantic, he is out of the door and on his bike, riding away. The stillness, broken.

 

In the wake of his passing, the flower in the road uncurls, turning soft and bright as spring in the moonlight.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Colorado_.

 

D.O sits in the kitchen, wondering, listening to the marble roll over the tiles.

 

He drove so far to get here. Just him and his own eyes staring back at him from the car mirror, and far away, the river and its gorge, great scarred rocks like old soldiers, making him feel watched. They’re closer than ever, now.

 

He wandered down into the garden courtyard, earlier, in that soft hour of the morning before even the light has really woken yet, when all the world holds its breath in shadow. Stood in the shade of the plants. He likes plants: calm, still, rooted. Defiantly alive.

 

Not so far off, now, the river rolls ever on. He’s grown used to it. When he stopped for food and gas and saw the gorge far off, his breath caught in his throat. Here, where rock rises bare out of the landscape, craggy and strong – this is the place he was looking for. Everything is bare here. This is where the lines between physical and emotional blur. He drove for so long to get here, to stand with the rock, in this strange, clear space. To know himself, and feel strong, knowing.

 

And yet somehow he’s more adrift than he ever was before. The earth isn’t rooting him, it’s letting him drown.

 

The tiles are cool under his legs: he uses that to ground him, leaning back against the wall. He gets confused about time, here, and reality. Sometimes he thinks he’s back in the car, on one of those endless stretches of road, just him and the sun. He saw storms forming from where he was on that journey, every now and again. He sees them here, too. They all blur into one. _The storm is coming_. Sometimes he dreams of the car, and sometimes of – other things – but they come and go in flashes, quick and unreliable as static. The static comes when he’s awake as well, that’s the problem. It’s getting harder to tell if he’s dreaming or not.

 

He gets confused about where he is, and he keeps losing time. Sometimes he looks up suddenly in the kitchen expecting to be in the garden. Then he realises he’s on the balcony. He stares out at the cliffs in the distance. The rock is the only constant. Then he’s in the kitchen again, curled on the floor, relying on the ground to keep him rooted, throughout it all. The storm is coming. The storm is coming. He can feel the moisture in the air, the clouds gathering. The storm is coming.

 

Idly, he lets a marble fall and watches them all roll, metal shining under a thread of sunlight, knowing in his bones exactly how they will move.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Marseille_.

 

Suho rises sleepily from the couch, the room light and empty-feeling with the paleness of the winter sky outside, and feels a shiver run through him. The water, a quiet, cool counterpoint to his whole life, whispers a little louder. Ripples. Only ripples, just yet. He heads into the bathroom, and sees the cool clearness of the water in his eyes. It’s growing stronger.

 

He wanders outside in a loose t-shirt and jeans, nothing more. The water is cool under his skin, running through the channels of his lungs, his head. _Soon, soon_. He lets it dictate his steps, carry him in no particular direction. An empty warehouse, a scrubby winter field, a quiet forest, all of them soft, almost expectant in the pale light. There’s a feeling of holding breath, of waiting. Still, still, the air unmoved even as the wind ruffles his hair. Holding still and waiting.

 

Under his skin, in his breath, the water grows louder, turns from the stream to the constant roll of the river.

 

All his life he’s had the water, there, whispering. He lingers in the forest for a while, walking ever further in, considering the plants, the overgrown paths, the seeming tameness of the birds. _It is coming, soon_. They will need safe places, secret places they can draw strength from. No-one ever comes here. Usually the birds are loud, glorying in their safety, but today even they are quiet. The water ripples in him, and for a moment he looks at his own skin and is surprised it hasn’t turned blue and translucent.

 

When he was little, he read books and watched documentaries on the sea. Other kids got scared by the strange things that lived down on the seabed in the dark, the deep sea creatures, and some got excited, but he did neither. He knew his kin when he saw them. Some days he feels like one of them, just as part of the water, just as inhuman. Water covers 75% of Earth’s surface, he remembers reading. Down there, it’s another world, another time. Here, on land, that’s the world he embodies.

 

He finds the abandoned field without difficulty, drops down into the empty swimming pool, pads across it. The water grows to a roar. He can feel it, the waves crashing, rocking under his skin. It’s the strongest now that it’s ever been. He feels like the sea in a thin covering of skin, the water-light shining through, the rhythm of the tide in his veins. _It is coming, they are coming. Soon soon soon_. And they will need him. Now, more than ever, they will need him.

 

He has never felt all human, has never felt all at ease on this earth, always held in the separate peace of the water under the skin and behind the eyes. A creature from the deep waters, another world, another time. But maybe that world is needed now.

 

As the waves come crashing in around him, Suho thinks: _hello_.

**Author's Note:**

> if you are triggered by unreality and the idea of not being able to trust one's own perceptions then you might want to avoid d.o's section, which is the penultimate one. 
> 
> i called the building in baekhyun's teaser a cathedral. it is, but not lyon cathedral. in fact i looked everywhere to try and find out where in lyon it was only to discover it's in FUCKING SPAIN


End file.
